If your impression of social media is limited to your friends posting cat videos and teenagers glued to their iPhones – think again.

Social media possesses incredible influential power, and since the advent of the Internet it's evolved from a simple way for people to keep in touch into a massive global network connecting organizations, communities and people.Social media is the easiest, fastest and most explosive way to transmit and receive information! And best of all – absolutely anyone can take advantage of it.

Check out the infographic to learn how to embrace the ubiquity of social media and use its power to better yourself, your business, or cause, and find a host of statistics and facts that may surprise you about the influence of social media...

If your impression of social media is limited to your friends posting cat videos and teenagers glued to their iPhones – think again.

Social media possesses incredible influential power, and since the advent of the Internet it's evolved from a simple way for people to keep in touch into a massive global network connecting organizations, communities and people.Social media is the easiest, fastest and most explosive way to transmit and receive information! And best of all – absolutely anyone can take advantage of it.

Check out the infographic to learn how to embrace the ubiquity of social media and use its power to better yourself, your business, or cause, and find a host of statistics and facts that may surprise you about the influence of social media...

INFOGRAPHIC: What Makes Social Media so Influential? via @MYDstudio http://sco.lt/...

"If your impression of social media is limited to your friends posting cat videos and teenagers glued to their iPhones – think again.

Social media possesses incredible influential power, and since the advent of the Internet it's evolved from a simple way for people to keep in touch into a massive global network connecting organizations, communities and people.Social media is the easiest, fastest and most explosive way to transmit and receive information! And best of all – absolutely anyone can take advantage of it.

Check out the infographic to learn how to embrace the ubiquity of social media and use its power to better yourself, your business, or cause, and find a host of statistics and facts that may surprise you about the influence of social media"...

INFOGRAPHIC: What Makes Social Media so Influential? via @MYDstudio http://sco.lt/...

If you've ever tried searching for free stock photos on the Internet, you probably know what a ridiculous hassle it can be.

As a general rule, free stock photos are extremely difficult to find. A huge portion of the stock photo market is owned by professional companies like Shutterstock and 123RF, who charge $20 or more for a single photo. Even when you can find free stock photos, most are low resolution, watermarked, blurry and, at best, uninspired.

Lucky for you, there are a few ways to access high-quality stock photos without any hassle or significant cost.

Here's a lovingly curated list of the world's best free stock photo websites for designers, business owners and anyone else:

Great information on how to build strong personas. What shouldn't be missed is the subject - "Buyer" personas.

All to often I've seen the most of the effort, most of the well formulated and understood personas to be the "user" personas.

These are subsequently used to drive marketing and often, the buyer persona is under-developed, an after thought, or completely non-existent.

It is critical to understand the buyer and leverage this understanding to drive targeted programs with meaningful content that reaches them and appeals to their needs and wants.

Doing this well can empower your "users" and internal champions to more successfully convince decision makers in the firm. It more easily opens doors for your sales team and, in the end, helps you close deals.

Check out these five copy writing tools every writer should have in their toolbox whether they are blogging for businesses, copy writing for websites, writing articles for clients or just doing creative writing.

Have you noticed that I publish a lot of visually appealing content on Quick Sprout? From videos to infographics, I’m constantly leveraging visual media.

Can you guess why?

It’s because these visual content pieces are generating more backlinks than any other form of content I publish, which—in the long run—helps increase my search engine rankings and overall readership numbers.

So, how do you create these visual masterpieces? Well, this infographic should help you....

Creating your own images is also an excellent tactic for re-purposing text-only content into enticing images. Here are some examples: Turn quotes into an interesting slideshow, post an event announcement on a pretty picture, place stats onto eye-catching graphs, give a blog post title some pizzaz, create an infographic about the history of your biz, create a catchy, custom featured image for a video, etc. The possibilities are endless.

To help you create images that get BuzzFeed-worthy engagement, here are 13 of our favorite and easy-to-use visual content creation tools....

A picture speaks a thousand words - some good resources here for visual content and creation to add a visual dimension to your messages, which tend to perform much better for opens and clicks than text alone.

The internet has radically changed the state of journalism, but content marketing is a relatively new field that can still benefit a lot from the practices of traditional reporters. In the interest of improving the field of content marketing overall, here are nine lessons from traditional journalism that every content marketer should know to better engage and build trust with readers....

It’s truly incredible how quickly content marketing has grown from an unknown term to a complete must-do marketing activity. In fact, these days, 90 percent of all organizations use content marketing in their marketing efforts.

How’s that for market adoption?

What’s even more interesting is the reason why businesses take part in it. As it turns out, content marketing generates about three times more leads and costs around 62 percent less than traditional marketing.

However, is the story the same for solopreneurs? In other words, if you’re the only person in your business, can you still use content marketing to your benefit and to find more clients/customers/business?

Let’s find out and get through the individual tactics and methods that solopreneurs can use to build a good content marketing strategy.

As you can see from the screenshot, when you eliminate all the areas that get cropped or covered up, you don’t end up with much “safe” space for your design. So, to help you out I’ve created three templates for you to download and use to fit your own purposes.One for small screens, one for large HD monitors and one that’s a combination of the two. They are transparent PNG files so you should be able to import them into your favorite graphics program without a problem....

In the age of social media democratization, news distribution is no exception. Nowadays journalists are competing head-to-head with brands and publishers for the most sharable content. The changing landscape of interconnected social news distribution and consumption also means that PR communicators need to strengthen their storytelling abilities and social angles to support their chances of media coverage in this competitive environment.A recent survey by Edelman, NewsWhip and Muck Rack with an infographic sheds light on how PR folks can exploit these changes to get the most coverage possible. Here are 4 takeaways for PR profs....

The story is the driving force, whether it is in the field of reporting, or marketing, or even teaching. The pressure of finding a story good enough to tell, and being able to do so in an interesting manner can make all the difference to the news report, or the boardroom presentation before the takeover, or even the class room on jurisprudence!

Obvious, however, doesn’t mean easy. Of course, creating a useful blog post, comment, update, or article doesn’t take the millions of dollars the big brands typically spend on 30-second television ads. But if it’s really good content, it takes expertise, thought, editing, time, and effort.

Influencer marketing on Instagram is a valuable asset for your social media activations. We’ve worked with a wide variety of brands and agencies on different influencer campaigns, which has taught us a lot about the best strategies for running influencer promotions on Instagram.

We outline the 10 best practices for influencers on Instagram and provide some real life examples from some of our partners....

If you are looking for a bird's eye view on what alternative collaboration tools are now available for different kind of projects and purposes, I do have what you are looking for.

The new Best Online Collaboration Tools 2014 directory is now public. It contains over 370 collaboration tools organized in over 25 different categories ranging from video-conferencing to screen-sharing, collaborative reviewing and many more.

The tools listed have all been checked and verified and represent my own personal census on what is available today for each one of the categories listed. There is no attempt (yet) to provide individual evaluations or recommendations, though I have tried to subjectively rank tools in each category according to their value and importance.

The directory is updated weekly.

New suggestions, comments and request for revisions and changes are highly welcome.

Bryan Kramer serves as a sort of Zen master to digital marketers. While marketers comb through social analytics, Google analytics and the other daily jetsam of marketing campaigns, only to discard the analysis when a new metric turns up, Kramer’s company Pure Matter exudes a composed calm, adjusting its campaigns [...]

“As marketers, we've been trained to speak 'business to business' (B2B) or 'business to consumer' (B2C). But instead of this creating a simple framework for dialogue between humans, it set forth an unnatural language for marketers, using words like 'synergy' and 'speeds and feeds' to tell the stories of products and services to their buyers and partners.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Both authors then go on to advocate for storytelling. Yay! I’m stoked. Yes – it’s about story sharing! Someone in marketing is finally catching on to the difference the dynamic of story sharing can make in marketing.

Imagine my dismay when I read a little further in the article “Yet, as Kramer told me, sharing needs to be combined with creative and interesting content. Story telling is important, and telling it in a creative way is key.”

Oh no! They missed the connection. What they are really talking about is “I create a piece of content, you share it, and I’ll share your piece of content in return.” Woo hoo – sharing has occurred.

OK – we know the magic that can happen when we share stories – H2H – back and forth. We know connection, trust, credibility, believability, and relationship gets established and grows. This is not the same as swapping blog posts, and the article shows we still have a ways to go in shifting marketing practices from telling to sharing.

What can you take away from this post? Well, there are 3 other pieces of advice the authors make that I like. And I love the points made at the ending. So go read those and tell me what you think.

Next, let’s all focus more on actually swapping stories between companies and customers to leverage the amazing power of H2H communication.

When someone asks you, "What do you do?" -- forget the elevator speech!! Yes, that's right. Just drop it. Share a 30-40 second client story instead. You will get way better results.

What kinds of results? Memorability. The listener will know the difference you make and the value you bring. You will have begun a relationship, turning a prospect into a warmer lead. These are all things we want.

Andy's post tells you exactly how to create a 30-40 second story. I've used this technique for years and it really works!

The only suggestion I would add is to make sure your customer story makes your customer the hero -- not your. Show the listener how the client was able to do something extraordinary. Everyone wants to be the hero. You are the secondary character.

Word-of-mouth advertising is very powerful. You need to earn the trust of your audience so they will recommend your products or services to their friends. Chances are that you’re already using Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to create engagement and thought leadership in your space. Social media analytics tools can help you make sense of how well your social media marketing efforts are paying off and identify areas that need improvement.

These 9 free social media analytics tools are some of the best out there.

Quote "As consumers have shifted their viewing to interactive devices (iPad, Xbox, PC), creators are free of many of the limitations of broadcast television, but few have taken advantage of this fact. Why shouldn’t premium video vary in length to accommodate the story? Why not embrace interactivity and innovate on formats that television simply cannot accommodate? Why not acknowledge the viewer, and engage him or her in real time? Why not embrace features from other media, such as video games?"

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.